Monday, May 30, 2011

i'm fortunate enough to have friends who own a villa on curacao island (very small island next to aruba) and fortunate enough to be asked to spend a few days there with them in march. we were triple fortunate enough to be there during carnival (island equivalent of mardi-gras). every night there was a huge parade with the most wonderfully elaborate hand-made costumes, head pieces and floats as well as fabulous fun music. the images above were taken during the sunday day parade that started the week long celebration. unfortunately, i was in a really bad position for good photograph taking, but some people were kind enough to slow down and pose for me! enjoy!

i'm so excited about this encaustic and felt workshop i taught at penland in late april! it was my first time at penland and i must say it is as special as everyone says it is-great food and accommodations, top-notch studios and an organized, professional staff-namely fiber studio coordinator megan fluegel and workshop assistant jamie sparks-many thanks to both of you! i was very impressed with everything and everyone there and look forward to returning soon.at penland, the early spring is devoted to 8 week concentrations in all of the studios and felting with the fabulous lisa klakulak was being taught in the fiber studio. as part of her felting concentration, i was invited by lisa to do a 3 day encaustic segment as a visiting artist. by the time i arrived, the felting participants had been felting every day for about six weeks, so they had created some amazing felt work and i was there to show them how they could incorporate encaustic into some of the felt pieces. lisa and i had been talking about doing this workshop together for over a year and during that year we had been working on samples, discussing some sort of curriculum and basically just experimenting to see what the two mediums could do together. at first i was concerned because i could find no examples of encaustic and felt combinations from other artists to work from and my first experiments were utter failures. i was about to declare the two mediums incompatible when i started to erase from my mind all i knew about encaustic-i wanted to start from scratch with what it could do with felt and i know nothing about felt, so i just went from there. in doing this i was able to build on the strengths of each of the mediums and put those strengths to use while making the samples. besides the basics of encaustic, i taught branding, working with horsehair, accretion and using the felt as an encaustic mono-printing surface. as it turned out, there were a good many successes and the students had a great time and made some awesome work. an exciting thing that happened at this workshop that doesn't usually happen in my workshops is that the students experimented more sculpturally and 3-dimensionally, which was very cool. the participants in this workshop were ava chan, lucia taxdal, ingrid eliasson, camila mesquita, judi zaepfel, jamie sparks, lisa klakulak.

look forward to reading more about this workshop in an article that lisa is writing for the fall publication of fiberarts magazine-very exciting!

i should probably talk about my april workshops before may ends! april was an extremely busy month that pretty much began with this mixed media encaustic workshop that i taught at the philadelphia guild of handweavers. this was my first experience working with the guild and i found it to be a wonderfully supportive and creative group. the workshop was kicked off by a lecture that i gave on the history of encaustic and it's contemporary applications. all members of the guild were welcome to attend this lecture, not just those who were participating in the workshop and there was a great turnout with lots of good questions. the workshop was a short two days that was jam packed with beginning encaustic, the use of tyvek with encaustic and branding. some of my favorite encaustic workshops are those that i teach to participants with an affinity for fiber. these ladies certainly had a love of fiber and made some great work! sorry for the lack of captions on the work, but i only labeled the ones i could remember-i believe everyone is represented though!!! Participants in this workshop were tiffany robbins, pam pawl, maryanne mcdevitt, kachina martin, maryann laverty, pat doran and mela koussis.

i've been very busy for the last few months making this work that will be shown in a 2-person show with howard hersh called 'hot stuff'-opening this saturday at gallery one in nashville, tn.to see details of each piece and more work in the series, visit the 'rows' portfolio on my web site here.

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